The KPMG study found almost 60% of 16- to 24-year-olds plan to block ads in the next six months.
Photograph: Alamy

Almost half of people planning to use an adblocker say a general dislike of ads is one of the main reasons for doing so, according to a new report that highlights the scale of the problems facing digital media.

The report by KPMG, which is based on a survey of more than 2,000 people, found that 44% of UK adults said they were planning to use an adblocker within the next six months.

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Of those people, 46% said they would block ads because they “do not like adverts at all”, only just behind the 47% of people who said that a key reason was that ads take up too much space on screen.

More than 40% also cited a lack of advertising relevance, and a reduction in the performance of the device they are using to view content, while just over a third said misuse of personal data was a cause and 23% cited ads using up mobile data allowances.

Despite the apparent overall distaste for ads, KPMG head of media, David Elms, said he believed this was due to the intrusiveness of ads, rather than a fundamental rejection of advertising in principle. “You have to remember that these are people who are responding to a survey at a particular point in time,” he said. “I think that as advertising becomes less intrusive, it will become more accepted.”

He said native advertising that blends into other content would help reduce the demand for adblocking, but more needed to be done to make consumers realise the need to fund the creation of the content they consume. “The big issue here is that people have to recognise that content has to be paid for somehow, that’s either through paying for them or accepting advertisements in one form or another,” he said.

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In another worrying finding for for publishers and advertisers, the KPMG study found that some of the groups who were most appealing to advertisers were more likely to block ads. Almost 60% of 16- to 24-year-olds plan to block ads in the next six months, as do 55% of people earning more than £55,000.

The KPMG report also said almost half have at some point used an adblocker, and almost 30% said they have done so in the last month.

The report will add to mounting concerns across ad-funded media. It follows hard on the heels of a forecast from eMarketer predicting 15 million people in the UK would begin using adblockers by the end of 2017, and just days after a report from the Advertising Association and Warc revealed that newspapers lost £155m in print advertising last year.

One of the few bright spots in the report comes from the more than half of respondents who said they could be persuaded to turn off an adblocker for access to content. About 36% said they would do so under some circumstances, while another 29% said they would switch it off in rare circumstances.

The two most common reasons cited for turning off an adblocker were for content from a source known to a user (48%), and from sources that “appear trustworthy” (32%).

The report also suggested adblocking currently remained more popular on laptops and desktops, with 91% of those planning to use an adblocker on those devices, compared with 44% who said they would block ads on a smartphone.